A new structure for the TYPO3 Core team

The TYPO3 Core Team started a restructuring process led by Oliver Hader and me. Over the following weeks working modes, processes and current requirements will be evaluated and ultimately result in a new and more sustainable team structure with an efficient working mode.

Background

Back in the beginning, the TYPO3 Core Team was a closed group of people developing TYPO3 behind the curtain. In 2007 that changed, the core mailing list was opened to the public and everyone was invited to start contributing patches - via mail attachment. Frequent and reliable contributors were occasionally invited to join the team, the product and the team grew. Dedicated release managers were assigned to take care of one specific release, releasing whenever they considered the version done. Previous release managers came together in the so-called “Release Team” supporting the current one. Over time the release team additionally worked on overall topics and strategies and slowly merged into the so-called TYPO3 Product Team. This team structure - consisting of a product team working more strategically and ‘long-term’ - and a core team “bundling” core mergers was not changed since then.

The CMS market changed quite a bit through these years bringing with it new challenges - technological, organisational and communication wise. In light of these changes we decided to overhaul our dated structure.

Changes: New Challenges, More Responsibilities, Bigger Project

In our current CMS world, the TYPO3 Core Team needs to tackle coordination with stand-alone projects like Fluid, get involved in bigger PHP community initiatives like the development of PSR-14 and keep track of a myriad of technological innovations in addition to contributing code and supervising contributors. Collaboration with other community teams like documentation and marketing became more important through growth of the project and neglecting these topics for a while result in a higher workload necessary to straighten out these topics.

Releasing no longer only involves packaging and providing the packages but our professional demand is to have marketing and press material ready, documentation updated and a stable and usable product at the same time - hence more coordination and organisation is needed.

On top, it’s part of our job to constantly assessing the viability of current and future technological solutions on a fast-changing market and the planned integration of modern technology.

Restructuring has begun - Stay Tuned

A restructuring process has been started and will happen throughout the following weeks - it will change the basic setup of the team, define how we work together, closely intertwined with each other with common roadmap and common goals - intersecting with other teams and collaborating professionally, efficiently while still having fun pushing the product forward.

Oliver Hader and me will lead that process - being part of the community and core team since ten years and more both have a lot of experience with TYPO3, the community and the team. Both of us having led the core team before can use the past adventures as well as our knowledge of our current challenges to lead us to a better team and working mode, and eventually being even more open for new contributors.

Expected Result and Next Steps

As a result of the restructuring process we will have a new structure and a new working mode that is sustainable, future-proof, adaptable to changes, transparent to newcomers, efficient and still fun.

We expect the process to take about two to three months, during which time the current development will continue - putting a focus on our precious v9 LTS release coming up, where all contributors are welcome to join the efforts.